Manhattan Noir

by Lawrence Block

  “Try it again. You’ll find out what you need through prayer. I gotta go. Don’t forget, okay?”

  He faded out, leaving me more confused than ever. I thought about it for a while, then hunted down my Rosary beads. Okay, God, I thought, if I’m supposed to have some sort of vocation, then let me know what you want me to do.

  Nothing happened that night, but I thought I ought to give God more of a chance than that to show me His will. I said the Rosary every night, but I didn’t receive any celestial direction.

  On the fourteenth day, my father’s younger sister Alma and her husband dropped by. They had a friend of my Uncle Juan’s with them. Sal was an absolute doll. He had a mustache and dimples that flashed when he laughed, which was often. He told jokes that cracked everyone up. His hair was dark and wavy, and I longed to run my fingers through it even though he was almost twice my age. I sat on my hands to make sure they didn’t jump out and touch him without my permission.

  Tío Juan clapped Sal on the back repeatedly. They were celebrating his promotion from patrolman to sergeant. Juan kept saying how proud he was of Sal, one of the guys from the neighborhood making it: a good civil-service job, benefits, a pension. But I could hear the envy underneath my uncle’s words. He was a baker, but he never managed to get into a union. He would speak about others in the family who had landed union jobs as though they had hit the lottery. It was clear that he thought his life would have been easier if he had made it like they did. When he started getting obnoxious, my aunt pulled him out the door.

  Sal lingered behind, saying goodnight to everyone, thanking my father for his hospitality. “It was very nice to meet you,” he said, looking into my eyes. His cheeks were made apple-round by his smile.

  I wanted to touch his dimples, so I jammed my hands into the pockets of my jeans to keep them out of trouble.

  He had been so easygoing and confident all evening that when he stuttered a little, I couldn’t imagine what was wrong.

  “I, uh, that is, do you think you might like—”

  My father had had a few glasses of wine and was watching us from his chair in the living room. “Oh, for chrissake,” he said, disgusted, “just ask her out already.”

  Sal blushed and grinned at the same time. “Really? Would that really be okay with you?”

  My father leaned back in the chair, his eyes almost closed. He flapped his hand in Sal’s direction, like, Don’t bother me.

  Sal cleared his throat. “Would you like to go—”

  “Yes!” I said.

  He laughed. “You don’t even know what I was going to ask you.”

  Now it was my turn to blush.

  He started again. “Would you like to go to a movie this weekend?”

  I pretended to think it over. “Sounds good.”

  “I’ll pick you up on Friday at 7.”

  “See you then,” I said.

  I dated Sal for three months before the attraction wore off. He was a gorgeous Latin male, but he was a Latin male. It was 1987, and the idea that I would be subservient because he was the guy grew old quickly.

  After we broke up, I found myself missing the stories he told about his job. I didn’t miss him too much, but the day I saw a sign on the subway advertising the next police exam, I realized that I’d been bitten by the bug. I signed up to take it, and I went into the Academy right after my college graduation.

  I was glad for the time I’d spent with Sal—it was good preparation for all the crap I had to put up with from the other cops. But I just laid low and smiled through the practical jokes, even the nasty ones. After a while, they stopped. I was pulling my weight, and then some. I started making some good busts, and a few of the old hairbags even gave me some grudging respect. I bumped into Sal once or twice at rackets, and he always made sure to let me know that he was dating a busty blonde. I didn’t care.

  When I had five years on the job, I was assigned to a detail that focused on getting the homeless off the streets. The mayor wanted the city to look clean—he didn’t actually want to clean it up, he just wanted it to look better temporarily for political reasons.

  One night, after a tour that dragged into overtime, I staggered back to the studio apartment I was renting on the East Side, exhausted. All I wanted was to go to bed because I had to be up again in six hours to head back to work. I had just laid down when Freddie Prinze appeared—on the ceiling this time.

  I groaned. “I’m really tired. Do we have to do this now?”

  “Hey, what’s the matter? You’re not happy to see me?” He sounded genuinely hurt.

  “No, no, it’s great, really. I’m just very tired. Can you come back another time?” This dead guy in my house was just too much after the day I’d had.

  “I have something important to tell you. That’s why I show up, you know. It’s my job to let you know this stuff.”

  I couldn’t keep my eyes open one more second. “I’m sorry. I really have to go to sleep.” I was out like a light.

  The next thing I knew, I was sitting up in bed, only I was fourteen again. I looked down at my knobby knees and tried to figure out what was going on. Freddie was slouching against the wall in Ed’s garage. What was my bed doing in California?

  “It’s a dream,” Freddie said. “It doesn’t have to make sense.”

  I didn’t feel tired at all, so when he spoke, I was happy to listen. I even enjoyed his company.

  “If you’re too tired to stay awake, I’ll just have to talk to you while you’re sleeping,” he said. “Here’s the thing: You’re gonna have to make a tough choice very soon. I don’t want you going down the wrong path.”

  “What are you talking about?” I felt floaty and good.

  “These homeless guys you’re dealing with—one of them is going to try to hurt you. Your instinct will be to shoot him. Do not shoot. If you do, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life. Think about this. It’s the most important thing you’re ever going to hear.”

  He started fading out, and then I wasn’t aware of anything else until the alarm woke me. The noise startled me back into the world, and I wondered whether my dream had been real. I didn’t have time to ponder it later that morning as I hustled homeless people into the converted trailers we had waiting for them.

  Scraps of the dream came back to me as the day wore on. Do not shoot. If you do, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life. I didn’t need a guardian angel to tell me that. I’d been around long enough to know what happens to cops who shoot and kill somebody. They get really messed up.

  We were almost ready to go back to the station house when one of the street guys pulled a knife out from under his seventeen layers of clothing and stuck it in my face. My adrenaline jump-started me, and I kicked out at the guy. He was wearing too much clothing for the blow to have any impact. It just made him madder. He slashed at my face with the knife. I felt a trickle down my cheek, and a moment later, fire blazed the same trail. I pulled my weapon.

  All my police training screamed at me to shoot. My finger started to pull back on the trigger. I aimed at the lunatic’s torso, just as I was taught at the range, but the view of my target was suddenly clouded. The sounds of the city were blocked out. All I could hear was the blood pounding in my ears. Each second felt like a month. Over the roar in my head, Freddie’s words came back. Don’t shoot … You’ll regret it …

  I lowered my gun. The crazed homeless guy jumped on top of me. Bulletproof vests aren’t designed to stop knives, and mine didn’t slow this one down.

  The knife slid in between my ribs, and I felt as though someone had disconnected my electrical charger from the wall socket. My essence just drained away.

  I had felt pain at first, but now I didn’t. I noticed a cop lying on the ground, red blood staining the blue uniform. It was me, I realized. What was I doing down there?

  Wait a minute, where was down there? Where was I?

  I looked around. The street appeared the same as it had moments before, except that I was
seeing it from above. Holy Christ, was I dead?

  Freddie appeared. “How you doin’? You all right?”

  “All right? I think I’m dead.”

  “Yeah, pretty much,” he said and looked down. Paramedics were covering the dead cop—me—with a white sheet.

  “Why’d you warn me against shooting?” I asked him. Then I realized that I didn’t have to ask. I knew without his telling me that he was just doing his job as my guardian angel.

  Then I knew something else. I wasn’t supposed to be dead. Freddie had screwed it up.

  “Yeah,” he said, acknowledging my newfound understanding. “What did you expect?”

  I thought about it. I really had no one to blame but myself for being dead. After all, what could I expect with Freddie Prinze as my guardian angel?

  THE ORGAN GRINDER

  BY MAAN MEYERS

  Lower East Side

  Antonio Cerasani rolled the mobile contraption over the broken cobble where Broome Street met Jefferson. The barrel organ had two wheels and handled like a pushcart. Every part of it gleamed in the bright sunshine. Even the country scene painted on its side seemed to glow with its own light.

  He settled the cart as close to the curb as possible in the least of the refuse that layered the streets. With the cart in place, he began to crank the organ. Music poured from the barrel with sweet abundance, almost blocking out the other sounds: babes howling, the scraping of thick shoes on the asphalt pavement, metal-clad hooves and wheels clamoring on the cobblestones, passersby in screaming conversations.

  The cacophony of everyday life. But here the very intensity of it was an abomination.

  Indifferent to the heat of the day, Tony wore heavy trousers, a vest, and a long brown coat. His shabby, dark brown hat sat atop his black hair. An enormous mustache hid his mouth. Only a wisp of smoke from the stub of the twisted black cigar gave any indication of where it was.

  The bitter tang of the cigar almost wiped away the stench of horse shit. Almost. The organ grinder hated the smell from when he was a boy in Palermo and had to sleep in the stable of his father’s padrone. New York was like a giant stable full of horse dung, particularly in this neighborhood where the White Wings, the street sweeping brigade, seldom ventured. Here the streets were ankle deep in dung and garbage, and the air, only barely modified by the briny reek of seaweed from the East River, was putrid with the rot of humanity.

  “La Donna e Mobile” rolled from Tony’s machine. He sang in a rich tenor voice. “Women are fickle, like a feather in the wind.” And as always, the children on the street laughed and danced haphazardly to the organ grinder’s music.

  He searched the tenement windows where once-white sheets stirred languidly in the tepid breeze. Several pennies wrapped in paper dropped from the windows and landed at his feet. The organ grinder, never stopping his music, tipped his hat to his benefactors, collected the coins, and dropped them into his coat pockets.

  One lone coin lay just beyond Tony’s stretch, but he did not want to interrupt the flow of music for the moment it would take to claim it, lest he lose further pennies. Tony cranked and Verdi gushed, but no more coins rained down on him.

  There came a loud braying, as of animals. Shouting. Blaspheming. Pounding feet. Racing toward the organ grinder were four boys, arms slender as the sticks they carried, their clothes ragged and dirty.

  Tony knew these demon boys; they lived on the street. They would steal the nails from the Savior’s cross. He stopped playing. The noise of the streets held sway again. He bent to retrieve the last coin, his coin, when with a cruel twitch of his ass, the largest of the boys bumped Tony, knocking the organ grinder into his organ, setting it trembling, akilter. He grabbed at the cart for balance, but misjudged and sank to his knees in the gutter filth.

  Screeching with laughter, Butch Kelly leaned over and scooped up Tony’s errant penny. The runt of the lot, Patsy Hearn, stuck his tongue through his scabby lips and gave the organ grinder a razzberry.

  Tony’s hands were in wild motion. His left felt for the coin no longer there, his right worked at steadying the cart.

  He struggled to his feet and brushed what offal he could from his trousers. Rage surged, all but suffocating him. He shook his fist at the rampaging youths and damned them, their forms and faces indelible in his mind.

  The organ grinder knew that he could not pursue these filthy little devils. If he did, one would surely circle back and steal his organ. He was not so green a horn to let that happen. No. He clamped his teeth tighter on the twisted cigar.

  The boys had shown disrespect. Antonio Cerasani from Ciminna, a village on a hill in north-central Sicily, never forgot an insult.

  Anyone watching the rude boys would have seen them running along Jefferson down to South Street. Here the East River and the docks stopped their straightaway rush. Nine or ten blocks farther south was the bridge to Brooklyn. It was their playground, all of it.

  The four, dressed alike in tattered knickerbockers and vests, their broken shoes wrapped with cloth and cord, ducked past horse carts and drays, shouting to each other, snatching food from pushcarts, brandishing their broomsticks, jabbing, threatening anyone in their path. Frequently they used their sticks to knock a hat from an unsuspecting head.

  At South Street, the broken pavement created a channel that cut through the sidewalk and ran into an empty, filth-ridden lot on Jefferson. South Street and the streets leading to it and the harbor were overlaid with a sludge different from elsewhere in the city. This filth bore elements of tar and seawater, for the East River, like its sister the Hudson over to the west, was not truly a river but rather a tidal estuary.

  Ships dotted the harbor. The boys could hear the water lapping at the docks, the noise and bustle of the sawmills at the lumberyards. Sawdust smelled sweet amidst the fetid odor of the salt and the tar. Stevedores unloading a ship shouted at one another and cursed the heat.

  Butch threw a rock at a seagull resting on a piling and missed. The gull gave a raucous caw, flapped its wings, and flew away. “Shit. Seagulls make good eatin’.”

  “They’re tough as an old woman’s ass,” Colin said, gnawing on the remnant of a potato he’d filched on the way.

  “Yeah,” Butch shot back, “your ma’s.”

  It was Colin who finally broke the stare between them, saying, “Let’s see if we can get some work on the docks.”

  Butch Kelly swung his stick. “Too hot to work.” He pointed the stick into the lot. “Run out, Patsy.”

  Patsy made an ugly face.

  “Run out.”

  Patsy Hearn shielded his eyes from the sun as he ran toward the heap of refuse near the back of the lot. Beyond it was some skimpy brush, and amid more garbage, a dying black walnut tree, its trunk slashed by lightning.

  “Feckin’ Butch Kelly with his feckin’ games,” Patsy muttered. Forever making Patsy the goat. When they played pitch-and-toss, Butch always cheated, stealing his feckin’ penny. Just like now with the dago’s coin. Butch would pocket the money and never share. And when they played tag or hide-and-go-seek, Patsy was always it. Now this cat-stick game. Here Patsy was in the hot sun, sweating buckets while Butch was swinging his stick, mostly hitting the air, sometimes hitting the pussy, and Tom Reilly and Colin Slattery was up close and catching it. And dumb shit-ass Patsy was out here in the stinking wilderness being cooked by the sun.

  Butch hit the pussy and it flew high, way over Tom’s and Colin’s heads.

  “Open your eyes, Patsy.” Butch’s laugh was nasty.

  Patsy ran like a greyhound. If he caught the feckin’ thing, maybe they could stop and get something to wet their throats. Nail some bloke toting the growler. Beer would taste good just about now. That’s what he was thinking on when his wiry body slipped in the slimy runoff from the rotting waste. He took a header smack into the disintegrating trunk of the tree. Still, he reached up and damn if the feckin’ pussy didn’t drop right into his hand like it was meant to.

  “Hey, boyo
s,” Patsy yelled, brushing splinters from his hair, “I got it!”

  He leaned against the scarred trunk sucking in short gasps of air full of soot and ashes. His eyes wandered to the pile of refuse on the other side of the tree, focused on something among the rubbish that caught the sunlight. Something shiny.

  A silver dollar maybe!

  Or maybe just a tin can.

  He moved closer, then stepped back.

  “Holy Mary.” The boy crossed himself, but he was not afraid. He was barely ten and not even a year off the boat from Cork. It was not the first dead body he’d ever seen.

  But it was the first naked dead woman he had ever seen.

  Curled up on her side she was, the ground a rusty black crust.

  What may have been her dress lay in rags all around her.

  “Jesus,” Colin said, peering over Patsy’s shoulder as Patsy kicked the refuse away.

  They milled around jittery, not able to pull their eyes from the sight until Tom nudged her with his shoe and she slid over on her back, totally exposed. The boys jumped. Her eyes stared blankly at them.

  After a moment, Patsy said, “Don’t she stink somethin’ awful?” The four edged toward the body again.

  “She’s worm meat,” Butch said. He gave Patsy a powerful push aside and reached down and grabbed the shiny object that had caught Patsy’s attention in the first place.

  “Hey, gimme that!” Patsy shouted. “I found it.” He tackled Butch.

  Tom and Colin jumped in and they were all trading punches and yelling and raising a huge volume of dust and dirt. Colin head-butted Butch, knocking the wind out of him, making him drop the treasure. Both boys dove for it, as did Patsy and Tom.

  A whistle shrieked. “All right, all right, what’s going on here?” A pudgy copper in blue came toward them swinging his stick.

  The boys broke and ran.

  Patrolman Mulroony grinned as the dust cleared. He made no move to go after the hooligans. He picked up the dusty stone the boys had been fighting over and wiped it on his sleeve. Well, well, well. He put it in his pocket. Hooking the strap of his stick on his badge, he lifted his hat and mopped the sweat from his head with the heavy sleeve of his uniform. Too hot. With August weather in June, the city was a stinking, rotting hell. Besides, they was just boys who had too much vinegar. Boys like that fought over nothing. He patted the object in his pocket.